The Illusion of Food and Counting Calories

I recently had a physical and found out I am prediabetic. Which isn’t that surprising given my past eating habits and my genetic and family background. It is still at a level where it can be controlled through lifestyle changes: eating healthier, exercising, losing some weight and taking better care of myself. I had been coming to the resolution myself in recent months that I need to eat more mindfully (reduce emotional eating) and exercise, as I have a five year old daughter and another daughter about to be born next month. The test results solidified this resolution.

I got onto a scale at home for the first time in years. I made a resolution to not buy ice cream. I am going to get 30 minutes of at least moderate exercise most days of a week. But the biggest change is I got onto Noom. It a health improvement app which helps you track what you eat and also gets you in touch with a wellness coach who can guide you periodically. It was free through my health insurance, and that pushed me over into trying it. So far I like it. It makes the whole change I am trying to do feel more real and that I am accountable to my resolution – tracking what I eat and talking to the coach makes me feel like I can’t live in my own head about this and that’s a good thing.

What’s clear after just a few days of this lifestyle change is how absolutely fundamental our relation to food is. Not just that we need food to survive. But that food functions as a way to structure our lives and to give it meaning. The greatest challenge I feel in making this lifestyle change is letting go of the emotional associations I have with food.

I was getting hungry at lunch time yesterday. My wife and daughter were out of the house. Usually this makes me feel I can eat what I want, so maybe I would go get some pizza or if I am feeling particularly “deserving”, then a meat ball sandwich or a veggie burger from a nice burger place. It would be a way to pamper myself, to reward myself for what I deserve, for what it is ok to for me to have.

What is the attraction of the pizza? It’s clearly not just the taste. The pizza is a substitute for what I feel I am missing or have missed out on in my life. Like most people, I daily go through the feeling that my life didn’t turn out the way I imagined it would. That there is a different life path I should have had, one which realizes my potential more. Let us call this feeling the alternate path. The attraction of the pizza is my brain, mind and body has over the years made a deep association between pizza and the alternate path such that pizza has come to feel like a substitute for the alternate path. The appeal and the draw of the pizza is the sense of relief it gives from my current, actual path in life – the path which I experience as being trapped in and which feels alien to me.

In fact, it is not just the physical properties of the pizza itself which my mind associates to the alternate path. It’s the whole thing of getting the pizza and eating it while reading some book or watching a movie. Going to the pizza place, ordering the pizza, being out and about, out in the world, amongst people while eating pizza – all of that reenforces the alternate path feeling, as if the way I am in the world and move about in the world in the pizza eating mode is somehow a gut level subsitute for moving about in the world as I would in my imagined better life which I missed out on.

From a purely psychological and physiological point of view, this is fascinating. How can food come to seem like a substitute for a way of life? It seems like a category mistake, as if I were mistaking eating pizza with interacting with people. But pizza isn’t a person. It’s food. It’s just food, one ways to say. Where is all this added emotional and social meaning that I am adding to it coming from? Is it just an illusion?

Famously, Proust in Swann’s Way describes the main character Marcel’s experience of eating a madeleine:

And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate, a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory–this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?…

The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before church-time), when I went to say good day to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea…. And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated panel which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine… In that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, all from my cup of tea. 

Proust here isn’t speaking of an addiction to food. Marcel isn’t addicted to tea or to madeleines. That is what makes the episode, and Proust’s description of it, so compelling. It is a completely ordinary event. Delightful in it’s everydayness. The tea and the madeleine evoke for Marcel a whole experience of his childhood, and bring it forth not just as a memory, but as something deeper and richer – as evoking that world itself and his connection to it, as if he were still a part of that world, and that world has materialized around him as he is having the madeleine.

This is a truism: food is never just food. Food is an evocation of a way of life. Of whole social structures and cultures, of habits and identities. Marcel isn’t just remembering Combray when tasting the madeleine, the way he might remember while taking a walk his eating madeleines as a child. The memory unleashed by the eating of the madeleine is more akin to his feeling transported to his childhood, as if there is a fusion of worlds, between that past and the present – where the past isn’t really past, and the present isn’t really the present, but both have been merged into an ethereal world of richness and possibility in which, Marcel says, “the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory… I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.” Swann’s Way is a kind of hymn by the grown up narrator to the potentiality of youth, of his rememberence of every nook and crevice of the meaning of that youth for him, filled with nostalgia and the power of potential.

Emotional eating is being addicted not to the taste of the food, but to the food as a gateway to the world one associates with the food. Often in emotional eating the taste actually starts to recede into the background, and instead it is the eating itself which becomes motivating and addictive. The feel of the eating. The meaning of the eating. The world it feels like it discloses. This is why it becomes addictive, as eating had become for me. It isn’t about taste and even less about hunger. Hunger and taste are merely the initial entries into eating – the polite reasons one can give to others for eating. But in emotional eating, the act of eating, and the going to get the food and the anticipation of it and the ritual of eating – all that becomes fundamentally personal in that it becomes inseparable from the world the food evokes and represents. Food, like alcohol or drugs or anything else one can become addicted to, becomes a way to transport out of a painful present into an imagined reality. Eating in that way is like entering a virtual reality machine. And one can enter that machine while being surrounded by people at the dinner table.

This is how I have related to food for most of my life. It can be American foods like pizza or burgers. Or Indian food like dosas or Malai Kofta. The structure of the eating is the same – the food as an entry into another world. Food as fundamentally an illusion, as a magic act which can transport me into being other than I am. Where while eating ice cream I am being transported in my mind into being fit and robust. Where while eating pizza by myself late at night I am transported into a bustling world of intellectuals debating over a meal in a restaurant. And unlike alcohol or smoking or drugs, everyday eating has the cover of seeming innocuous.

The challenge of being on Noom, and counting calories and logging them, is that it forces me to separate eating from the world making aspect of food in the way I have become habituated. It’s as if Marcel were to look at the calorie count of the madeleine before picking one up. He wouldn’t be transported to Combray then! To think of madeleines in terms of their calories, and the sugars and the carbohydrates, is to think of it primarily in relation to nutrition, not as memory or as world-disclosing. It is to feel as if one were losing the virtual reality machine and were getting stuck in the uncomfortable present without a way out. To be forced to confront the vicissitudes of life, and to feel mediocre, accidental and mortal.

Of course, this sense of feeling mediocre and mortal is itself also an illusion. Noom seems good to me so far because it seems rooted in positive psychology and well being rather than just being a calorie counter as such. It suggests that what is at issue in eating better isn’t the loss of meaning but the creation of new, healthy meaning structures around food – meanings which don’t have to be virtual or imagined, but can be actual. Counting calories, then, isn’t just a mechanistic, soul erasing denial of the social meaning of food, but is a way to restructure my habits so that I can let go of the old social meanings I associated with food, and create new habits and meanings. It is to see madeleines or pizza not just in terms of calories or in terms of their nostalgic world disclosing capacities, but as part of new social habits in which health is prioritized over nostalgia, and well being over the virtual reality machine. It is to let myself develop the mental muscles to see the illusory nature of my old habits regarding food, and to orient myself towards new worlds which can be explored.